You lied

You Lied

So where is this ‘new’ normal you were on about homie?

The cars are choking the roads again

and the folks are all kettled on Durdle Door.

The planes are going to be back in the sky

and the horses are going to be jumping those fences

and Premier League Footballers will sleep in their sleek silk sheets once again.

America is Burning

England is Dreaming

You are both in denial you bastards.

Those who died?

Just numbers? Yeah we know

The economy is everything

and

Cummings is a cunt and Epstein didn’t kill himself

and

Prince Andrew watches Boris Johnson running around the garden

wishing that he was younger, a lot younger and slimmer and female.

Maitlis takes the night off but forgets to tell her mates.

And you will ask us to vote for you again in four years time

and we will have to forensically examine the voting paper

for any signs of anti-semitism.
That was a lie by the way Margaret Hodge.

The Prime Minister calling Muslim Women letter boxes

 and his scientists asking us to wear masks.

But all will be well when we are back to work

 and don’t have enough time to discuss with you Basic Income.

You didn’t lie

We lied to ourselves

I lied to myself

thinking, hoping and praying that there would be a 'new' normal

And George Floyd is the King in Martin Luther King Jr

R.I.P

Stigma or Dishonesty

Here you are folks, another rambling blog post with no specific point, just another bleedin stream of consciousness but it does give you the chance to play the great Nat King Cole (above) as you read.

As another Mental Health Awareness Week creaks to a close, beads of relief sweat fall from the brows of people who won't have to address the questions going around in their own mind the main one being "Am I Mad?" for at least another year.

By all accounts this lock down has been challenging for peeps emotional well being. I never know what to call mental health these days. When first diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder in January 2006, I started on the journey of a mental health evangelist telling everybody who would listen 'that we all have mental health'. Nodding and smiling, their eyes said "Keep taking the tablets". Well I stopped taking the tablets in August 2008 and have therefore been nearly 12 years free of psychotropic drugs.

Watching the Tony Slattery documentary last night (on somebody else's TV licence) I realised how common co-morbidity with substance abuse that 'psychological problems' are. People who had seen the documentary were all saying how sad it was on social media but I felt that it was an extremely positive reflection and Tony appeared 'better' or 'happier' at the end of the programme than he seemed at the beginning. 

Outside observers will never know how you actually feel because they don't live in your head like the gremlins or social media trolls from the past. The Bipolar spectrum was being discussed in relation to where Tony might fit and a world expert from Oxford and an addiction Counsellor from the South West were consulted but the crux of the matter came when Tony travelled with his partner Mark to Queen's College Belfast. It was here that childhood trauma was discussed as the most obvious trigger for Tony's challenges as an adult. A very moving programme and similar in its honesty to the actor David Harewood's documentary this time last year 'Psychosis and me'. The relief I felt after watching both these programmes was palpable. Thank you gentlemen for sharing your stories.

The difference between them and I is that I am not famous, not a celebrity (and none of their talent). Although both their lives had their challenges the question I would like to ask the ether is 
"Do you have to be a celebrity or do you have to have been a celebrity to discuss mental health where people take note of what you say?"
For somebody to go from nobody to somebody with a mental health history is extremely rare. Many have gone from 'somebody' to 'nobody' and told their tales. These emotive terms to describe people are of course ridiculous but Tony appeared to be searching for his lost star, the star that had been stolen by childhood trauma.

Shortly we will all be returning to a 'new normality' but the cynics among us will know that it wont be long before we continue on the big dipper ride of insanity with its Premier League heroes and its Celebrity reality television series. The artificiality and shallowness will creep back into our lives and within months we will all be back to the busyness that keeps most of us from thinking about death and about the end. If you have been asking yourself 'Am I mad?" during the lockdown then you are probably not alone. The Grim Reaper has been reading the number of Covid 19 deaths every night during the Government Press Conference. You have probably been trying to work out whether you are going to reach your goals before death comes for you.

Twelve years down the tunnel on the 'mental' to 'normal' spectrum I am no longer the tub thumping mental health evangelist I used to be largely because normal people don't really want to know. People don't want to know until it happens to them and by then it is too late. So now I largely keep quiet about the subject and only wax lyrical when invited to do so, so lucky for you that Mental Health Awareness week only comes around once a year.           

https://sharkfishinginwales.blogspot.com/2014/09/rambling-rose.html

UK lockdown causing 'serious mental illness in first-time patients'

THANK YOU TO THE GUARDIAN FOR ALLOWING ME TO ANALYSE THEIR RECENT ARTICLE BY DENIS CAMPBELL, HEALTH POLICY EDITOR.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/16/uk-lockdown-causing-serious-mental-illness-in-first-time-patients

"Adults and children are having psychotic episodes, mania and depression, with some taken to hospital because of the heavy toll on their mental wellbeing."

If they are taken to hospital then the first line of treatment will be some kind of sedation and medication. Medicate first and ask questions later whereas under ideal conditions it should be the other way around but because services are so stretched the gentle 'brain chemistry' if there is such a thing is going to thwacked by the chemical cosh.

"Men aged 18-25 are reported to have been badly affected by first-time mental health issues. Previous research has suggested they feel the worst affected by restrictions on their movement, and are most likely to flout the lockdown."

I bet you, they are trying to process what has happened to them between the ages of 7 and 17. Don't forget we are talking about young men who have been regimented and conditioned by the 'discipline' of the school system and the moment they experience a little bit of freedom they have it taken away from them by some more 'experts'. They may be smoking strong weed in their bedrooms and they experience flashbacks. The repressed unhappiness that they have sat on since childhood floods out and it has nowhere to go, only tears and rage and perhaps psychosis. 

A survey it undertook of psychiatrists across the UK revealed that families were experiencing significant tension as a result of staying at home together all the time.

So why are families held up to be the glue that holds society together? Have they not heard of Philip Larkin's poem 'This be the verse' 

“One woman rang us recently and said her partner was walking around their house like a zombie because he wasn’t working and couldn’t provide for the family and had just snapped.”

The poor old hunter gatherer. What pressures are heaped upon the patriarch? Fucking useless man. Can't provide for his wife and children in a lockdown? What kind of man is this? Why doesn't he go out and kill a woolly mammoth?

One mental health nurse said that she and her colleagues were seeing people with a set of symptoms they had christened “corona-psychosis”. Such patients have typically lost their job and are having trouble sleeping, becoming anxious from watching the news on TV and no longer getting social support through their normal networks.

Why doesn't the TV news come with a government health warning? Oh it's because it's the government that is hammering the message home. "You are just a mere economic cog, a bar code to pay taxes. You could die you know but don't worry we have your best interests at heart. The Prime Minister survived. You might survive also if you are lucky"

One psychiatrist told the college that “lockdown has exacerbated behavioural difficulties in children” and another that they had seen “patients having severe psychotic symptoms which incorporate Covid-related themes”.

Well at least the professionals are acknowledging that there is a cause to psychosis and that symptoms and themes are important in listening to the patient. Psychosis just doesn't appear from nowhere. It is a build up of unacceptable feelings and emotions that society has not allowed free expression. The human soul then bottles it all up feeling worthless and awaits a trigger: Cue Covid 19.

 "The NHS has been adapting our services to ensure people can still get care like talking therapy or counselling with their clinician, even while still adhering to government guidance.”

Talking therapy and counselling? Luxury, sheer luxury. When I was living in shoe box in middle of road, the only thing they could give me was medication. 

I will leave the last word in analysis to mental health guru and expert Mystic Dai.

Climate versus Jobs

https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/delhi-pollution-two-photos-that-show-the-problem-is-not-limited-to-ncr-3741185/

Ok, what I am about to write might look like a 5 year old with a red crayon, no disrespect to 5 year olds and red crayons. I had a shock earlier on when I saw a grey haired but unmistakable John Selwyn Gummer, he who had fed his daughter a beef burger to prove that there was no Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in it (Mad Cow Disease in Cattle) arguing for the Climate over Jobs when the lockdown is lifted. He was waxing lyrical about working from home with investment in broadband more important than in road infrastructure. "Call yourself a Tory" I heckled before I realised that he was now a big Kahuna burger on climate change.

They can see the Himalayas from the Punjab. Air Pollution has diminished over China. The bones of dead gondoliers and dolphins can be spied gamboling through the canals of Venice. The geifr of Pen-y-Gogarth and the goats of the Great Orme have reclaimed the streets of Llandudno from human beings and this is as it should be. We are on the verge of going back to insanity. Of trying to manufacture and flog brand new cars that nobody wants. People have found their legs again and it's taken a virus for this to happen. A virus that was brought into the British Isles by the aviation industry. You can stop blaming bats and the Chinese and 5G masts and start blaming the aviation industry and globalisation.(Yes Mr Smarty Pants I know that 5G is part of globalisation. I'll throw my red crayon at you!) Blame the airlines for cramming people in like sardines and flying them in from Northern Italy with no checks and no quarantine. Blame the cavalier Boris Johnson for shaking hands and boasting about it when the science had told him not to. 

I read 'Screw it, let's do it' by Richard Branson once and enjoyed it, thinking he was quite a cool dude but then he humiliated Jeremy Corbyn and started sniffing around the NHS. His trains were fast but I never flew with him. In fact I haven't flown since 2005 and that was an Easy Jet bringing me back to Bristol Airport after 114 days incarceration in a jail in Amsterdam. I'm not bitter, I'm not bitter. I have always thought flying is overrated.Train travel is over rated. None of these modes of transport can operate if they practice social distancing. Imagine social distancing on trains? Heaven. No longer having to listen to train guy on his mobile.

No the Climate is far more important than jobs. If we all go back to global insanity after lockdown then the sacrifice of the 258 thousand people who have died thus far from Covid-19 will have been in vain. You lift the lockdown too early and the next wave of virus will be rubbing its hands to Happy Birthday ready to kill again. 

They are talking about staggering work hours. Common sense. Why does it need a virus for us all to start thinking clearly. Staggered work hours means less traffic congestion, means fewer problems at the Brynglas Tunnels and allows the wildlife of the surrounding wetlands to breath a huge sigh of relief. 

"We don't need no education" sang Pink Floyd in 1979, well "We don't need no steenking jobs" I will sing outside the Job Centre. We need a Climate. We need to see the Himalayas one more time. Jobs for those who want them, because they want something to do with their time NOT so they can earn oodles of cash at somebody else's expense. Wake up and smell the fresh air in the inner city.  Who mentioned Universal Basic Income?